What I am moved to add comes out of my both my 30 years of professional experiences working with children and families, and also out of my many personal years of healing, unburdening, and transforming intergenerational and cultural childhood trauma.
In reading the words of Erika Jordan, part of what came up for me is related to my eight years of working with the Healthy Start program. I visited with families and their children in their homes offering parenting support, information, resources. The deep relationships that I built with families sometimes lasted for five years, from birth to age 5. I also learned so much that was helpful and empowering for me as the mother of my own three sons.
One aspect of what I offered to parents was an awareness of the three different forms of parenting:
- "Marshmallow": A form of neglect. Anything goes. Lack of consistency. No clear boundaries, structure, and age appropriate expectations. Lack of a safe container for growth and guidance and unconditional love. Tenderness, vulnerability, and a range of emotions are not consistently mirrored, not modeled, not accepted. Ruptured parent-child bonds because the child cannot trust the parent to support them emotionally and with their developmental and attachment needs. The child is not seen for who they are. The child internalizes a sense of a flawed and fragmented self rather than a whole self. Fear, shame, anger, and delusions are internalized.
- "Authoritarian": Parenting through fear. Spanking and physical punishments. Rigid rules without explanation. Threats - do what I say or else. Parental demands and expectations cannot be questioned. Overt or covert abuse and violence is normalized. Dominance. Might makes right. Tenderness, vulnerability, and a range of emotions are shamed. Ruptured parent-child bonds because the child cannot trust the parent to support them emotionally and with their developmental and attachment needs. The child is not seen for who they are. The child internalizes a sense of a flawed and fragmented self rather than a whole self. Fear, shame, anger, and delusions are internalized.
- "Authoritative": Parenting through love. Discipline = learning opportunities. Expectations are developmentally appropriate. Parents are compassionate and able to mirror their children. A range of emotions are supported, held, and given support, understanding, and guidance. Structure, boundaries, loving and compassionate support are consistent most of the time and can be trusted. A safe container for growing into who the child really is. Strong bonds exist between the child and the parents. The child is seen and loved unconditionally. These are the children who grow up to be the most resilient, empathically aware, open-hearted, kind and strong, able to discern lies and recognize and live by truth. They are grounded in being worthy, grounded in love.
So many of us, certainly myself included, did not grow up with authoritative parenting. Consequently, many of us absorb ways of being in the world that are rooted in authoritarianism, in patriarchy, in misogyny, in racism, in dehumanizing others because we were not wholly embraced as tiny vulnerable children for who we were. We can have so many blind spots, wounds, delusions, and pain without even beginning to recognize it or know the roots of our suffering. At least this has certainly been true for me.
This is also true given the imperialist, white-supremacist, misogynistic, capitalist, patriarchal culture that has been long normalized in America and beyond. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Boys will be boys. Boys don't cry. Rugged individualism. Might makes right. Brutality, violence, domination, othering is just the way it is. And on and on.
From this perspective and awareness, the deep tragedy of what happened to Renee Good is certainly not an anomaly.
It is also true that every single instance of violence and trauma is a potential wake up call that holds the potential to more deeply shake us out of our lack of clear seeing and into the greater truths, wisdom, compassion, and fierce love that is the core of who we are — before the trauma, before the neglect, before the fear and shame, before we were abandoned and thus learned how to abandon ourselves. And to the degree that we have disconnected from ourselves is the degree that we will remain disconnected from our human and nonhuman relations here on Earth. And that is where the dangerous projections, delusions, violence, and turning away comes from. First we turned away from ourselves.
There is no blame or shame in this whatsoever. This is what has happened to the vast majority of us. AND it is never too late to seek and connect with the support that we need to see what we see, feel what we feel, need what we need, and awaken from whatever degree of slumber that we have unknowingly been in. We humans are capable of so much good.
This is the time when we need to recognize the many layered impacts of authoritarianism. From this grounding we can stand in the fierce love that is so urgently needed.
Bless us all, no exceptions...
— Molly
Blood On the Airbag
Good morning. I have been reading and watching and listening to everything that I can get my hands on about the ICE shooting in Minneapolis of the mother of three. The absolutely best psychological breakdown of what happened in those moments before Renée Nicole Good’s life was taken from her came on TikTok from a social psychologist named Erika Jordan. I have faithfully transcribed her words which I find to be extraordinarily insightful:
“The ICE agent released his own footage because he genuinely thought it cleared him. In his moral framework, dominance equals innocence.
Watch the video. A sarcastic comment is made and he calmly switches the phone to his other hand to free his gun hand. That's not panic, that's preparation, and the timing matters.
The escalation comes immediately after a sarcastic remark (from another woman), which points to ego threat and dominance injury, not fear driving the response.
In use of force psychology, that's intentional escalation.
Renee tries to de -escalate.
She says, I'm not mad at you dude.
He shoots her three times in the face, two times from the side, then calls her a slur. And afterwards, they lie to the crowd's face, claiming paramedics are there when they're not. That's not chaos, that's narrative control.
Here's why that video makes him look more guilty to normal people, but less guilty to his supporters.
People aren't just interpreting the video differently. They're emotionally defending the act because their world view requires violence to be righteous when authority is threatened.
Social psychology research shows that people with authoritarian cognitive styles tend to treat perceived challenges to authority not as evidence to evaluate, but as existential threats to defend emotionally.
Authoritarian brains don't ask, was this justified?
They ask, was authority challenged? Once the answer is yes, violence feels righteous.
Violence against perceived lower status others isn't a defensive necessity. It's a reaffirmation of rank and control.
His life wasn't threatened.
His authority was. That's why he released the footage.
In that world view, punishment is proof of being right. When power defines truth, evidence doesn't matter. Obedience does,” Jordan said.
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